{"id":352,"date":"2011-09-20T17:39:30","date_gmt":"2011-09-20T21:39:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.free.fr\/blog\/?p=352"},"modified":"2012-06-15T17:43:07","modified_gmt":"2012-06-15T21:43:07","slug":"the-visual-display-of-quantitative-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/antoine.wojdyla.fr\/blog\/2011\/09\/20\/the-visual-display-of-quantitative-information\/","title":{"rendered":"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

… is a serious issue. That’s what Edward. R. Tufte<\/a> says in is book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Cover of Tufte's book. The image is an old French train schedule considered by Tufte has one of the best information visualization ever.<\/p>\n<\/div>

I’ve came to read this book after reading D. MacKay’s books (1<\/a>–2<\/a>), since I just was marvelled by their pretty uncommon presentation.
\nHis books have a very large margin, to provide a lot of space for illustration or remarks. Moreover, his way of graphically visualizing things are always very inspired.<\/p>\n

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An neat visualization of "the probability distribution over the 27x\u000227 possible bigrams xy in an English language document" – from D. MacKay "Information theory…"<\/p>\n<\/div>

So I decided to follow his example when I’d be writing my Ph.D. dissertation. That’s how I stumbled on the tufte-latex<\/em><\/a> package, and discovered the work of Tufte. I discovered that a dissertation is not a book eventually, and that I should keep the good ol’ format.<\/p>Still, I was on and tried to learn more about data visualization.
\nThe idea is that it can be really hard to explain a situation with a graph, but it’s still the best way – when you really<\/em> have quantitative<\/em> information
\nTufte gives a set of rule (such as the ink-to-data ratio) to present things clearly. He gives alot of historical and contemporary example, showing that most of the time poor graphics are just dishonest e.g.,<\/p>\n

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The worst chart ever according to Tufte. There really are only four data points<\/p>\n<\/div>\n